


Play It Like It's Real

by aeli_kindara



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dean in Hell, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-07
Updated: 2017-11-07
Packaged: 2019-01-30 12:27:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12653517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeli_kindara/pseuds/aeli_kindara
Summary: "That’s how it happens. One minute, he’s reaching for the tongs, nice and hot from the forge he wheeled in. The guy is screaming and screaming, yelling for someone named Barbara, and Dean really doesn’t give a fuck. The next, he’s in a dark pine box, and there’s no one there at all."Dean's back from hell, but he isn't sure it's not some game of Alastair's. Dean POV of 4x01.Warnings for graphic violence and allusions to dub-con.





	Play It Like It's Real

Dean’s in the thick of it.

There are days when he loves this — loves pinning souls onto this rack, taking them apart slow, inventing for himself what exactly they’ve done to deserve it. Sometimes, he tortures them for it, makes them tell him, bit by bit. Reinvents their own crimes for them, a thousand times worse. There are days when he feels like an avenging angel.

Then there are days when he feels like a monster, like a roaring maelstrom of hatred, and those are good too. Days when he tortures for the joy of it, when Alastair is close by his side, cajoling and encouraging. Alastair’s sick satisfaction bleeds into Dean’s own, and he presses himself to strive, to come up with ever more creative horrors. He’s learned the trick of it by now, warping reality around them, and there are days he’s as good at it as Alastair ever was — days when he learns what makes them tick and uses it to take them apart from the inside out. Just as his blade works them away from the outside in. Alastair comes to watch him, sometimes, murmuring encouragement in Dean’s ear, pressing close, and — well, sometimes they’ll fuck then and there, the soul choking on its own blood on the rack behind them, pleading helplessly to uncaring ears. Those are the best days.

There are a few days when he hates it. When the horror and evil of it all comes crashing into him, when he remembers the man he was enough to be ashamed at what he’s become. Alastair usually punishes him, those days. Dean usually likes it, by the time he’s through.

Most days, though — most days, or many of them, it’s just like going to work. It’s the job. Most days, he does it with a clinical detachment, his mind on other things. Well, not exactly — often, he’s pondering the nature of pain, its specific variants, the ways to bring them about. Sometimes, he’s thinking back to his own days on the rack. There are days when he’s thinking about nothing at all. There are some — a very few — when he’s thinking about Sam.

It’s been forty years, and no sign of Sam. Somehow, Dean never thought seriously that Sam might not end up here — and maybe that’s his own preconceptions. Maybe Sam’s up in heaven right now. Or maybe he’s still out there, lived improbably to a ripe old age. Maybe he quit the life. Maybe he’s got kids. Grandkids. A dog. Sammy always fucking loved dogs.

He doesn’t think these things with the kind of urgent, desperate need he used to. It’s not that he cares less. It’s just — it’s been so long, he’s been through so much. Sam is maybe, hopefully, free and clear. Hasn’t pulled any demon deals to get him back from this place. They’re better off this way, each of them where he belongs. Dean finds some comfort in it. He pounds a nail into a guy’s head, jerking him grotesquely back against the rack. His screaming’s annoying; maybe Dean will cut out his tongue. Too bad they always grow back.

That’s how it happens. One minute, he’s reaching for the tongs, nice and hot from the forge he wheeled in. The guy is screaming and screaming, yelling for someone named Barbara, and Dean really doesn’t give a fuck. The next, he’s in a dark pine box, and there’s no one there at all.

\---

At first he thinks it must be Alastair, punishing him.

He waits it out for several minutes, breath getting shorter as the oxygen dwindles. It’s an unusually sedate torture, for Alastair; then again, it’s psychological, which is his mentor’s bread and butter. Dean considers it carefully. It just doesn’t seem that worth getting amped up for. Just some straightforward asphyxiation — is that really it?

It’s more out of curiosity than anything that he starts to explore his own surroundings. He knows he’s not nearly powerful enough to change what Alastair has wrought — if it’s a test, he’ll need to get out of it on his own, or ride through it. He’s wearing clothes — more than usual. In his pocket, there’s a lighter.

Dean frowns. A lighter? He hasn’t seen one of those in — in decades. You don’t need a lighter in hell.

It hits him then. Something about the feel of this place, this body, the pain it’s in — not the pain of hell, pure and inventive and terrible, but deep aching pain, the kind you get from lying still for way too long. And he has a lighter, and Alastair hasn’t started murmuring in his ear yet.

This isn’t hell. This is real life.

The panic hits him in a wave. Leave it to him, to Dean fucking Winchester, to somehow wake up in his own coffin after forty fucking years and let himself die again simply because he couldn’t be bothered to try and get out.

Besides, if this is just Alastair’s latest game — well, it’s not like he has any pride left where Alastair is concerned.

\---

It’s when he lights it that it all becomes real — really, utterly  _ real _ . He can see himself, in snatches, his own flesh and blood body, can feel his lungs heaving as he starts to hyperventilate. “Help,” he tries to call — maybe there’s someone out there, somehow. “ _ Help! _ ” It comes out as a croaking scream. There’s no answer.

The box, though — the box is cheap, just pine, and Dean’s never been weak. He hammers it hard, and it gives. Again, and again, and it’s splintering under the blows, dirt showering down onto his face. He scrabbles against it, breath coming in sobs —  _ Alastair must love this _ — and then he’s worming his way out, clawing through the earth, higher, higher —

His hand finds air.

He can feel the breeze, and he doesn’t think, thrusts the other one after it. Widens the shaft enough to breathe, and then he’s heaving in grateful gulps of  _ air _ , real air, that doesn’t smell like blood or sulfur or human stink, and he’s hauling himself to the surface, thrusting his face out into it, heaving himself out like a drowning man onto dry land.

His whole body aches, like a real  _ body _ , like something that experiences more than simple extremes of pleasure and pain. There’s sun on his face, behind his eyelids. It’s bright — too bright. Still gasping, Dean rolls on his back, and lets it bathe him. This isn’t possible. It can’t be real.

It’s real.

\---

It takes him several minutes to work up the courage to open his eyes, first rolling facedown again. He squints into the grass. It’s green. He barely remembers green, aside from his own eyes. The number of times Alistair carved them out to show them to him —

Several more minutes of letting his vision adjust. There’s a simple wooden cross beside his — beside his grave? Is this where Sam and Bobby buried him? (And for God’s sake, why didn’t they burn him? Are they idiots?) In any case, it’s the cross he uses to lever himself upright, and the irony isn’t lost on him — the number of times he’s been nailed up on one of these things, the number of times he’s strung up some other poor bastard. It’s hard to see it as a symbol of anything but hell.

The sky above is blue and cloudless. The air is warm, summery. All around him, a hundred yards in every direction, every last tree has been blasted from the ground. As if a bomb went off.

As if Dean’s grave was the bomb.

\---

Dean walks.

It’s the only real thing there is to do. He quickly strips off his flannel — why is he wearing a flannel? he didn’t die in one — and just walks, no particular direction. The sun is hot, beating down on his head, but it’s not hell-hot. There’s all this nuance here, all this subtlety — things he’s forgotten. His throat is on fire with thirst. He’s felt these things so much worse, down there, but with every step, as he gets more convinced this is happening, he’s more and more — what? Scared? It’s a stupid word, but he can’t argue with the truth in it. Things feel  _ real _ here. Unpredictable. Terrifying. This is a world where he could asphyxiate in his coffin and it would really be true. A world where he could collapse from dehydration on the side of a highway.

As he walks, he calculates. Forty years. Bobby must be gone by now, and Sam — well, he’s thought plenty already on where Sam might be. If he’s still around — Dean doesn’t want to fuck with his life, not if it’s a good one. If he’s still hunting, then, maybe. If not… what? Look for hunters? Go it alone? He’s got no money, no IDs, no resources at all, no idea what’s changed. His body doesn’t feel old or shriveled, though. Nor does it feel decomposed. More like it was when he left it, minus his guts hanging out of his belly. It feels normal. Just the aches and pains, and the overwhelming thirst.

This is fucking weird.

After an hour or two — it’s hard to keep track, he’s easily distracted, out of practice with this sun and wind and trees — he comes across the gas station. “Hello?” he calls at the window, that strange bird-scream of a voice, but the sign says Closed. He used to know what to do here. He wraps the discarded flannel around his fist, breaks the window, turns the lock.

There’s water in the cooler.

For a moment he’s sure that he’s been wrong. This is still hell after all; this thirst is Alastair’s latest punishment. He’ll reach the water and pour it down his throat and it will disappear; or else, it will be acid, or poison, something that burns his insides into goo, and then he’ll cough it out on the floor and Alastair will be there, laughing —

No. He has to try.

He pours half the bottle straight down his throat. There’s no tricks. It’s the best thing he’s ever tasted.

_ All right, Dean, _ he thinks to himself.  _ Get it together. If this is the world — if this is the real world — you need to get it together. Can’t treat it like one of Alastair’s nightmares. You got that, Dean? The real world? You need to remember this. You need to get your bearings. _

There’s a newspaper rack across the room. Dean remembers newspapers — he spent a lot of time with newspapers, back in that other life. Newspapers have dates. That’s a start.

He crosses the room and picks it up. It says,  _ September 18, 2008. _

That can’t be right. It can’t. But he somehow already knows it is — knows by looking around, how familiar it all seems, the TV and the radio old-fashioned even for his time, the car outside. It hasn’t been forty years. It’s been four months.

The implications take his breath away for a moment. “September,” he says aloud, testing the idea. His voice sounds normal, deep, rejuvenated by the water. If this is a punishment, it’s the weirdest fucking one Alastair’s ever come up with.

_ Play it like it’s real, _ he reminds himself. It’s still 2008. It’s been four months. He’s been in hell — four  _ months?  _ Alastair once spent longer than that slowly unspooling his intestines, dissecting them, braiding them into rope. He  _ knows _ that’s true. Which means this isn’t real.

Or. Or, maybe time works different in hell. That’s possible, right? Maybe every month up here is ten years down there.  _ Keep telling yourself that, Dean. _

_ Play it like it’s real. _ Dean washes his face in a dingy sink, rinsing off dirt and a little blood, but nothing like what should be caked on him, nothing like the gore and stink of the place down below. In the mirror, he’s young and strong, just like he left himself. Well, except for being torn to shreds by hellhounds.

Studying himself in the mirror, he lifts his shirt. His chest is clean and unscarred. Not even the marks of a lifetime of hunting. Just his tattoo, the one to ward off demon possession.

This can’t be real.

But there’s something else — a particular pain he’s been getting more aware of. He turns, pulling back the sleeve of his shirt. There, on his shoulder, is an angry red handprint, burned into his flesh. It  _ does _ hurt. It hurts like a motherfucker.

_ I’ll have to get used to Earth pain again, if I’m gonna play this like it’s real _ , Dean thinks.

Food, water, porn. Cash from the register — it only takes him a moment to remember how to open it. But as he’s shoveling it into his pockets, the TV on the counter turns on. Static.

Dean freezes. It’s been long enough, but he knows what that means. As he moves to turn it off, the radio comes on. There’s something here.

Salt lines. There’s salt on the shelf; he grabs some and starts pouring. But it’s not just the static — there’s a noise, a strange horrible noise, in his ears. It’s all he can do not to clap his hands over them. But he has to keep pouring the salt, he has to —

The window shatters. Dean lunges away, but the glass in the cooler doors shatters too, and the noise goes on and on, and this is nothing like the pain of hell, this is something else, it hurts in his ears but it also hurts somewhere deeper and stranger, somewhere that feels like it might be his soul.

Then the noise recedes.

He’s on the floor, hands over his ears, covered in broken glass. He gets up gingerly, trying not to cut himself ( _ Why, pet? You know how you’ll wind up either way _ ) — stumbles to the door and stares outside.

There’s nothing there.

\---

The glass in the phone booth outside isn’t broken. It does take the cash register’s quarters, but he tries three different numbers of Sam’s, and they’re all disconnected. Would Alastair do that, if this were his twisted invention? Dean doesn’t know. Alastair would have no trouble speaking in Sam’s voice, telling Dean he’s a disappointment and a failure, telling Dean how much he truly screwed up his life. Does that mean this is real?

_ Play it like it’s real _ . Dean tries Bobby next, and he picks up on the first ring. “Yeah?”

The sound of his voice almost knocks Dean off his feet. “Bobby?”

“Yeah.” He can hear the impatience, the unspoken  _ idjit _ .

“It’s me,” says Dean.

“Who’s me?”

“It’s Dean.”

Bobby hangs up.

On the second try, he answers the phone with a “Who is this?”

“Bobby, listen to me —”

“This ain’t funny,” Bobby growls over him. “Call me again, and I’ll kill ya.”

Well. This is going nowhere.

_ Play it like it’s real. _

Dean hotwires the car in the yard — hardest thing he’s had to remember yet, and he’s kind of proud of himself for it — and starts driving.

\---

He gets there in the morning. Stops for a few hours by the side of the road to sleep, and _ that’s _ fucking weird, he hasn’t slept in forty years. It makes him jumpy, the idea that anything could sneak up on him. And if he needs sleep, then surely that means —  _ surely _ that means it’s real.

_ Play it like it’s real. _

Of course, just being real doesn’t mean it’s not a game of Alastair’s. It could be his latest amusement — bring Dean back up topside, let him start to think he’s really made it, then yank him back down again. If it is — well, as always. Nothing he can do about it.

The sun’s high by the time he knocks on Bobby’s door.

He can’t suppress his little grin of relief at the sight of Bobby, standing there like he’s looking at a ghost. Which he maybe thinks he is. “Surprise,” Dean says.

Bobby doesn’t buy it, of course. As he gets his head on straight, it’s obvious to Dean that he wouldn’t either, in Bobby’s position. He thinks, for a moment, that reeling off his history with Bobby has worked, and then there’s a knife in his face again, and Dean is fighting for his life. ( _ Maybe that’s my joke, pet. Give you a taste of life only to get sent right back to me by the closest thing you’ve got to a father. _ ) He gets the knife away, though — it feels funny in his hand, the first weapon he’s held since leaving hell, it has a weird weight to it, not what he’s used to.

“I’m not a shapeshifter!” he yells, thrusting Bobby away from him, weighing the knife in his hand.

“Then you’re a revenant!” Bobby returns, and undoubtedly Bobby’s got another weapon stashed somewhere, and Dean’s only got seconds.

“All right,” he says. “If I was either, could I do this? With a silver knife?”

It gives him a moment of pause, rolling up his sleeve and slicing into flesh. So familiar, so easy, but this is  _ real _ flesh, this is  _ his _ . It feels strange to slice in front of Bobby, even this little amount. Like having sex in front of your dad.

“ _ Dean? _ ” says Bobby.

“That’s what I been tryin’ to tell ya,” Dean returns.

Bobby pulls him into a hug.

\---

“What do you remember?”

There’s an instant of hesitation. But he can’t possibly tell — can’t tell him any of it. “Not much,” says Dean. Then, more certain: “I remember I was a hellhound’s chewtoy. And then… lights out. Then I come to six feet under. That was it.”

Bobby’s looking down, and Dean can’t tell if he believes him. It doesn’t really matter. If Bobby suspects he’s lying, he’ll just think he doesn’t want to talk about the pain. That’s fine by Dean.

He wonders, vaguely, what this would be like if he’d come back ten years ago. If they’d brought him back just when Alastair had taken him to pieces completely; before he’d started putting Dean back together again in his own image. Ten years ago — rock bottom, everything that used to be his pride, his self, dribbling bloody across the floor.

Dean can remember being proud. Having ideas of what he will and won’t do. That’s been a fantasy for a long time. He’s recreated himself, in the last ten years. Learned to play a role. This is just another role. He can handle it. He’s got the training. He was Dean fucking Winchester longer than he was ever Alastair’s little sidekick. No problem.

Next thing on the list: Sam.

\---

Standing at the door of Sam’s motel room, a part of him is screaming fear, a scared and rabid thing, clawing at the walls of his intestines and begging him to go, to leave, to stay far away. It’s a natural response, in its own way. It doesn’t surprise him. All those years, all those demons wearing his brother’s face, all the things they said and did. When Sam comes around the corner, when his eyes catch on Dean, there’s this moment of  _ spine-ripping-Sam’s-teeth _ that almost knocks him sideways. But doesn’t.

Because the thing that does surprise him is that none of it matters. None of it can touch him, not really, not past the overwhelming rush of affection. Because he’s here, and he’s alive and whole, and Dean has wanted nothing, nothing, never wanted anything more.

“Heya, Sammy,” he says.


End file.
